Billy Gatewood was my first best friend. Through our three years together at Garfield Junior High and our first year at Berkeley High, he was the person with whom I seemed to go almost everywhere and do almost everything. During our last years of high school, we were still friends, but not as close as before. After high school, we saw each other infrequently, and usually only briefly. Around the early sixties, we lost touch altogether, and for many years I had no idea of what had become of Bill. Finally, one day in 1977, when I was living in Los Angeles, I heard an FM radio station announce something about a William Gatewood exhibition at an art gallery. An art show! I figured that that "William Gatewood" had to be Bill. I always knew he was artistic, and he had told me something about attending an art school the last time I had seen him. I called the art gallery to see if I could get in touch with Bill, but as it turned out, it would be an entire year before we actually made contact and got together.

I think it was during the fall of 1978 that I spent an afternoon with Bill in his West Hollywood apartment. At that time he was recently separated from his wife Linda and was "trying," as he put it, living with a man. Although I had never suspected Bill of having a gay orientation when we were younger, somehow that news didn't surprise me. If there was one constant in Bill's life, it was that he was never conventional.

Unfortunately, after that one afternoon, we again lost touch. I never saw Bill again. The next news I had of him came in 1991, when I heard that he was living in San Francisco, caring for his partner, who was dying of AIDS. Several years later I learned that Bill, too, had died of AIDS. I regretted not having seen him again before he died but was grateful at least to have had that 1978 meeting that helped bridge the long gap since our early friendship.

It's now twenty-three years later, and I find myself wholly absorbed in trying to reconstruct the grade school years of my youth. All this looking back to my early past has naturally made me think a lot about Bill. To my surprise, I'm realizing something for the first time that now seems so obvious that I marvel that I never noticed it before: part of Billy Gatewood lives on within me. Had I not had the privilege of being his friend those many years ago, I would probably be a recognizably different person today. Perhaps if I try to recall as much as I can about Billy, I can make my point clearer.

Earliest Memories

I wish I had a flood of stories about Billy from our Oxford years, but I simply don't recall much about him from those days. I'm pretty sure we were good friends at Oxford, however. After all, we lived fairly near each other (his home was a few houses up from the Circle on Los Angeles; mine, about a block up the Arlington). I don't recall exactly when we first met, but it must have been around the time we were in the second grade, for that grade is the earliest in which he appears in any of the class pictures that Jim Dean, Mara French, and I have collected.

My sharpest memories of Billy are all from later years. Nevertheless, I know we must have been pretty good friends by the fifth or sixth grade, because I have a picture (somewhere!) showing him on a camping trip on which my dad took me and a few friends while we were still at Oxford. I also remember an incident at Oxford, one that Jim alludes to in his memoir. While Jim and Bill were drawing a huge jungle mural for some kind of project, Bill invited me to join them. Unfortunately, our teacher (Mrs. Rutherford) thought that two artists were plenty, so I wasn't able to make my contribution. However, I learned something from watching Bill and Jim draw: They used a technique that would never have occurred to me--blackening in spaces between the trees, giving the mural a much richer look than it would have had if they had left the background white. (Forgive me, Jim, if I'm wrong, but I suspect that was Bill's idea.) I recall later drawing lots of little jungle pictures myself, emulating that technique. I'm sure I copied a lot of other drawing techniques that Bill developed.

Bill showed an artistic bent from an early age and did a lot things purely for artistic effect. When we were in the seventh grade, for example, he discovered that he liked the way his handwriting looked when he wrote first in pencil then went over the words a second time, stroke by stroke, with a ballpoint pen. (Try it!) For a while, he wrote most of his homework assignments that way. I liked that ink-on-pencil look, too; however, the strain of writing everything twice was too much for me, and I soon gave it up. I imagine that when Bill eventually gave it up, he did so not out of laziness but because he was on to something new.
 

The Redwood House

I finally got my chance to work with Bill on an art project when we were in an eighth grade civics class that required a big term project. Most of the prospective projects seemed deadly dull, but Bill and I noticed a loophole: We could submit some kind of crafts project as an alternative to a written report. Moreover, we could do it as a team. Somehow we landed on the idea of making a model house. Our creation was a modern affair--a fully furnished flat-roofed redwood house with lots of big windows (we must have raided a craft shop for supplies). One of its finer touches was a pond in its front yard. I'm pretty sure that was Bill's idea. For water we used a little piece of translucent glass or plastic that looked surprisingly real, and we covered its edges with moss and bits of driftwood. One of my own touches was a tiny television set with a picture in the screen.

Naturally, we didn't give much thought to the relevance of our house to the civics class; our interest was entirely in the design and building. To justify the project, we wrote a puffed-up blurb about redwood and ecology. To our amazement, our civics teacher (Dr. ____) was thrilled with it and called it one of the finest projects any of his students had ever submitted. He kept the house on display for some time. Afterward, Bill and I agreed to sharing custody on a rotating basis. I don't know how long we kept it, but it eventually began to fall apart ... and it did take up a lot of space! One day, I got bored with, took it out to my backyard and burned it. When I told Bill, he was upset--not because I had destroyed the house but because I hadn't invited him over for the conflagration. Well, you can't expect arsonists to keep up with the rules of etiquette.
 

Car Lover

Bill loved cars. It wouldn't have surprised me if he had become an automobile designer. One year, probably while we were in high school, Bill and I got very excited when a representative of the General Motors Corporation came to school and spoke about auto design. He painted a glorious picture of the rewards awaiting the winners of the company's annual teenage auto design competition. Entrants were to design cars and sculpt them from balsa wood. Bill and I again shot off to the hobby shop and bought big blocks of balsa. It didn't take me long to discover that I lacked the patience for precision work, and I ended up carving my block into something that must have looked like a potato with fins. I don't recall how far Bill got with his own model car, but I'm sure it was a lot farther than I did.

Some of Bill's enthusiasm for cars must have rubbed off on me. I think once Bill and I went around Berkeley to auto dealers, collecting flyers for the sheer joy of owning beautiful pictures of the latest model cars. Those flyers were truly fine: beautifully printed on heavy glossy card stock. In those days, we knew every model of every American car for every year. I was thinking about that outing recently, when I drove by the once lovely art deco building on corner of Durant and Oxford where a Buick dealership once was.

If you look at Mara's picture of Bill's house on Los Angeles Street , you'll notice a big picture window in the front; that was the Gatewoods' living room. I remember sitting with Bill looking out that window, watching cars drive by and playing a game he called "My Car, Your Car." Not much of a game, really, but we took it seriously. If the first car coming down the street was my car, then the next one was Bill's. It's funny how much satisfaction I got from having a Porsche be "my car," when the next car coming along was a beat-up Plymouth.

I've only been to one professional automobile race in my life, and it was a sports car rally that I went to with Bill and his dad. Bill's parents were both wonderful people--real Father Knows Best, Donna Reed Show types--and I think I must have regarded Bill's father with as much awe as I did my own. Both men seemed infinitely talented and capable. Bill's dad took us to that sports car rally in his old Dinwiddie Construction Co. pickup truck, on whose bed he built makeshift bleachers. I have no recollection where the races were held, but I don't they had kind of regular seating. Most people watched the races standing up, or sitting on folding chairs or on their own vehicles. That day we had the best seats in the place: Bill's dad backed his pickup truck up fairly close to the track and assembled the plank bleachers from which we watched the races in comfort from a comparatively high altitude. I came away from those races in love with Lotus sports cars. They looked futuristic and seemed to win more than their share of honors that day. For years afterward, I tended to think of the Lotus as the finest sports car ever made and was always surprised to hear when one lost a race.

Speaking of cars ... I just now remembered a story that Bill relished telling. During the mid-1950s, there was some kind of one-on-one competition between an American Ford and a Soviet car, which the Ford won handily. Bill laughed heartily telling me that in the Soviet press, the results were reported as "SOVIET CAR TAKES SECOND IN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION; AMERICAN ENTRY PLACES NEXT TO LAST."
 

A Free Spirit

As I Bill and I drew closer as friends, I suppose I regarded the two of us as being fairly equal in most ways--a natural feeling among adolescent friends, I'm sure. I felt comfortable with him because he seemed like a true peer. It must have been only very gradually that I came to realize what an extraordinary person he actually was. A manifestation of his artistic creativity was his constant search for new techniques--a search that we now know he would pursue throughout his life. That willingness to experiment characterized his whole attitude toward life. He was always ready to try something new and didn't worry one bit what anyone else thought of him for being different.

Judy Mazia recently told me that when we were at Oxford, Bill often defied convention by playing with the neighborhood girls. How typically Bill! True, he climbed over Judy's fence to avoid detection by other boys, but that was merely good sense. The point is that he was never one who waited around for someone else to tell him what was cool or uncool to do.
 

A Shorts Story
 

When Bill and I started Garfield Junior High School in the fall of 1955, I felt about as uncool as any seventh grader could be but took some comfort in regarding Bill as equally uncool. The truth, of course, was that Bill may have been one of the coolest boys ever to hit that blighted school. It merely took me and most everyone else more than a few years to realize that fact.

Difficult though it may now be to believe, back when we started junior high school, the idea of boys wearing shorts to school was virtually unheard of. There wasn't any rule against it; it simply wasn't done. Until, that is, Bill Gatewood hit Garfield Junior High. I don't remember which grade we were in when he first proposed the idea of wearing Bermuda shorts to school, but I know that was I slightly appalled by the idea. I knew I was no trend-setter. Nevertheless, he talked me into it, and I'm pretty sure that I must have stuck close to him the first day we turned up on campus in shorts. It was one of the first lessons in bucking convention that Bill gave me. There would be many more.
 

Our Brief Life of Crime

While we were Garfield students, Bill and I undertook a little nocturnal adventure that brought us back to the Oxford campus. It was probably a Halloween evening, as we went prowling, looking for mischief. Somehow, we made our way to the Oxford schoolgrounds, where we found an unlocked door or window in the cafeteria building that allowed us easy entry. I think that must have been another case of Bill having more bravado than I, for I surely would not have gone in by myself. Once we got inside, we didn't do much, except skulk around in the shadows, savoring our daring, knowing that we weren't supposed to be in there.

Later, while we were high school students, Bill did something a lot more daring, and for once I didn't follow his lead. We were hanging around the Garfield campus one afternoon when no one else was around, and got to wondering how many stray balls might have found their way to the roof of the new gym building. Well, Bill wasn't one for talking when he could do something, so he climbed up on the roof above the locker rooms. There he found quite an assortment of kickballs, volleyballs, and softballs, which he tossed down to me, while I kept a lookout. That roof wasn't all that high, but it was too high for me.

After throwing down all the balls on the gym's lower roof, Bill became interested on what treasures the upper roof might contain. That roof was at least twice as high, and the only way to get up on it was to shinny up a drainpipe running down one of the corners. That was a challenge that required not only daring but also strength and skill. I don't think I could have climbed one of those pipes if my life had depended on it, but Bill shinnied right up and over the top, while I watched, paralyzed with fear for his safety. He made it up and down unscathed, but it still gives me the chills thinking about it now.

I have no recollection what we did with all the balls we collected that day. We probably didn't  even take any home.
 

Sportsman

Bill was exceptionally strong and probably had a lot of untapped athletic potential. So far as I know, he never played on any organized teams, but he once did something in junior high that surprised me greatly and was another stage in my growing awareness that he was no ordinary person. Around the time we were in the eighth grade, he participated in a city-wide track meet and set a Berkeley junior high school record for the standing long jump. I had known he was good at that event but hadn't, until then, realized how good. I was better than average at jumping myself, but when we competed against each other, he usually outjumped me by a foot--a big difference. I think his city record was something well over nine feet.  (If nine feet doesn't seem like much, remember that this was the standing broad jump. Get out a tape measure and try a jump yourself.)

If Bill ever competed in any other formal athletic competition outside of school gym classes, I'm unaware of it. Toward the end of our sophomore year, he and I considered going out for football and attended a meeting that Coach Moffett held. The coach passed out a sheet of instructions for calisthenics recommended for football players. I took the instructions home, studied them, tried a few of the simpler-looking exercises, and then promptly forgot about going out for the football team. I expect that Bill did the same thing. (To my own credit, I used some of those same football calisthenics for youth soccer teams I coached many years later.) One sports activity that I do recall Bill's doing well was water skiing. And that thanks to the fabulous speed boat that his father owned. Somewhere during those years--probably when we were in junior high--Bill's dad bought a fourteen-foot boat with a 250-horsepower Cadillac engine in it. No one ever took greater pride in possession than I did (vicariously) in being a close friend of a person whose father owned such a miracle. (If Joe Mueller reads this, perhaps he can confirm the date, as I'm pretty sure that Mr. Gatewood rented the Mueller's garage on Shattuck Street to store the boat.)

I was thinking about that boat recently when I watched one of those You've Gotta See This! sports shows, which had a segment on high-speed boat accidents. The Gatewoods' boat could go about sixty miles per hour, and on the several trips I made on that boat, I never saw anything afloat that could rival it. To me it was the Lotus sports car all over again, except that this time the object of my affection was a member of the family. (I had the great pleasure of visiting Bill's parents five years ago and surprised the heck out of Mr. Gatewood by remembering the name of his boat: Sea 'n' Ski. He named it after a suntan lotion he liked.)

Dating Days

Most of my early dating experiences were double dates with Bill. Indeed, the very first real date I went on was a double date to the California theater when we were in the eighth grade. I took Leah Pederson, and Bill took a girl from El Cerrito, Linda Booth, whom he knew through his family's Christian Science Church. I'm pretty sure that he never dated her again while the two of us were hanging out together. I was thus surprised to learn, more than twenty years later, that girl was the woman he eventually married.

In the tenth grade Bill and I went out on double dates so often that I'm not sure I went on any dates at all without him. I took a lot of comfort in having him along because nothing fazed him and there was never any chance of conversation drying up or our running short of ideas on things to do with Bill present. I dated a number of different girls, but through that tenth grade year--and afterward--I think Bill dated only one girl, the inimitable Susy Thatcher. Susy adored Bill, and I always regarded her as comfortable and fun company.

I recently found a photograph taken during one of our double dates that speaks volumes about Bill. I don't recall the specific occasion, but I'm pretty sure it was taken right after a high school dance. Bill was with Susy, and I was with Ann Southwick. The picture shows Ann and me wearing regular clothes and looking slightly preppy, while Bill and Susy were dressed as a cave man and woman .  I think the dance must have been some kind of costume-optional affair, at which I, obviously, opted not to wear a costume. Bill, on the other hand, was completely uninhibited; he wore some kind of home-made imitation animal fur, and Susy wore an imitation leopard skin, and both of them were barefoot. That was pretty daring attire at a high school dance in 1958. However, it was a typical example of Bill's willingness to be different . (Come to think of it ... I think Bill had a lifetime aversion to wearing shoes. I'm pretty sure he was barefoot when I saw him in 1978.)
 

High School Politics

Despite his eccentricities, Bill clearly found a welcome home at Berkeley High. At the end of our sophomore year, he was elected president of the class for the following term. (He was one of three Oxford grads elected a class president at the high school; the others were Dave Gordon and Norm Randolph, who was also elected school president in the twelfth grade.) I was daring enough to run for a class office myself that term but lost. During our last two years at Berkeley High, Bill and I tended to move in different circles--much to my regret.

During our senior year Bill did something that profoundly shocked me. It did no one any real harm but demonstrated what I think was a lapse in judgment on his part. At the same time, however, it was an example of his creative brilliance.

Toward the end of every term, the school held a pre-election assembly at which candidates for schoolwide offices gave little speeches before the student body was turned loose to vote. At the end of the fall 1960 term, Bill ran for vice president of the student body--an office that traditionally inspired humorous speeches from candidates. I recall one fellow who ran for that office twice. The first time he came out in a leopard skin suit and danced around on the stage, acting like George of the Jungle. He lost that election but won the following term, when he came out dressed in black with a top hat and delivered a very somber speech, saying that he was an "undertaker" and wished to "undertake the job of vice president." I suppose it would be fair to say that the speeches for vice president represented the most reliable comic relief in the mostly tedious election assembly. So, with Bill running, I was expecting something special.

When it came time for the principal, Mr. LeTendre, to introduce Bill, he dropped a bombshell: Bill couldn't speak because he had been in a serious automobile accident the night before and was at that moment in critical condition in a local hospital. An audible gasp arose from the audience, and I sat frozen in my seat, horrified by this hideous news. However, before I could fully collect my thoughts, a voice from a wing of the stage cried out, "No, no! Please, wait!" and to everyone's astonishment, Bill came rolling out in a wheelchair, wrapped in bandages from head to toe, like a mummy.

Bill's gag was one of those brilliant ideas that plays better in the conception than in the execution. As relieved as I was to realize that Bill wasn't really injured, I was appalled by the trick he had played on everyone and felt personally hurt that he hadn't let me in on the gag in advance. I wouldn't be surprised if he lost that election because others shared some of my revulsion. Still, the sheer originality of the gag was typically Bill.
 

Our Last Meeting

That afternoon I spent with Bill in 1978 is now itself so far in the past that I remember very little about it, apart from general impressions. Bill was slim and fit and had a neatly trimmed beard and seemed full of energy. He showed me some of the paintings he was working on, and I was impressed by both the realism of his representational work and the boldness of his concepts. At that time his professional career must have been just taking off, as he told me that he was making barely five thousand dollars a year.

We talked together for about four hours. Afterward, it struck me as remarkable that we had said almost nothing about old times. Our conversation had been almost entirely about recent developments in our lives, what we were doing at the time, and our thoughts about the future.

One of the recent developments that Bill talked about was his marriage. As I mentioned earlier, he was then separated from his wife Linda. However, he still loved her and thought he might eventually go back to her. He seemed to regard his relationship with his male partner as an experiment. Bill also said something that afternoon that puzzled me, but the harsh truth of his remarks came back to haunt me several years later. He made several comments about how "painful" life could be. He was obviously alluding to the pain that he felt in not being able to make his marriage work, as well as the pain he knew his wife was suffering. At the time, I was generally content and happily married, and my own life had been blessedly free of personal losses and troubles. I simply couldn't understand what this great "pain" was that Bill was talking about. Five years later, however, when my wife left me, I began to understand exactly what Bill had meant, and I still often think about what he said that day.
 

A Summing Up

Although I'm now left mostly with general impressions and a few sketchy anecdotes about Bill, I'm nevertheless certain about the impression that he made on my life. He taught me a great deal about not being afraid to take chances or to be different. He also helped me unleash creative powers of my own that have served me well as a writer. I take some pride in having done more than a few things in my lifetime that were different, and even a few things that took some courage. I feel that I'm anything but conventional and hope that I'm not going too far in saying that some small part of Bill lives on within me. I wish he were here now, so I could thank him.